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Topic: Unicode Characters In File Names (Read 1271 times) previous topic - next topic
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Unicode Characters In File Names

I am encountering issues with fb2k not handling Unicode characters correctly that may exist in file names.  Weird things happen for any file name containing a two byte character.

This is what happens if a character within a file name contains two bytes:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/f0ou3s6h5vfkql6/fb2k_unicode_filenames.png

From the screenshot above, the file names having the issue are:

Code: [Select]
03-Stockholm 2358 (Acidulé remix).flac
08-Space Romance (Acidulé Remix).flac

Is there a setting I may enable to properly handle two byte characters?

Thanks.

Re: Unicode Characters In File Names

Reply #1 –
I did paste my currently installed components into the troubleshooter site to find three crash issues:

Code: [Select]
foobar2000 troubleshooter
The following components found on your system are known to be problematic and should be either uninstalled or updated to their latest versions:

foo_uie_vis_channel_spectrum.dll : Channel Spectrum panel 0.17.2
Reason: Repeated crash reports, division by zero bug.
Download the latest version...

foo_uie_vis_peakmeter_spectrum.dll : Peakmeter Spectrum Visualisation 0.2.0.0 beta
Reason: Repeated crash reports.

foo_uie_biography.dll : Biography View 0.4.2.4
Reason: Repeated crash reports.
Download the latest version...

foo_uie_elplaylist.dll : ELPlaylist 0.6.9.1.2(beta)
Reason: Repeated crash reports.
Download the latest version...

I will certainly download the latest versions, but I have not had a single crash while using fb2k to date.

Re: Unicode Characters In File Names

Reply #2 –
Okay -- I worked around this issue.

As long as fb2k does not have issues with two byte Unicode characters in tags, this is manageable.  If two byte characters in tags causes issues, this will cause problems.

Re: Unicode Characters In File Names

Reply #3 –
foobar2000 doesn't have such issues with Unicode. Either your files are missing tags or perhaps they were tagged with a broken software and can't be read back. You can easily write those characters to the file tags with foobar's tagger.

Re: Unicode Characters In File Names

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Case on
foobar2000 doesn't have such issues with Unicode. Either your files are missing tags or perhaps they were tagged with a broken software and can't be read back. You can easily write those characters to the file tags with foobar's tagger.

First-- thank you for posting your reply.  I appreciate your assistance.

My work-around had nothing to do with changing tags or how they were written.  I have not seen any issues with fb2k's handling of tags at all.

The issue I posted above is related to Windows 10 Professional's default handling of file name creation.

My work-around was to change file names from this:

Code: [Select]
03-Stockholm 2358 (Acidulé remix).flac
08-Space Romance (Acidulé Remix).flac

to this:

Code: [Select]
03-Stockholm 2358 (Acidule remix).flac
08-Space Romance (Acidule Remix).flac

I had to rename the files removing all two byte characters and replacing with single byte.  I actually had to do this for both files and directory names containing two byte characters.  This was quite a lot of work for my work-around, but I got it all done.  I have actually misspelled the artist's name above with my work around.

Re: Unicode Characters In File Names

Reply #5 –
I don't understand what you are implying. Your screenshot appeared to be from some playlist viewer and it couldn't show any metadata for the two tracks. Windows has supported unicode in filenames since NT days, long before Windows XP. But depending on language locale that character in your files even works without any unicode support.

Re: Unicode Characters In File Names

Reply #6 –
The issue shown in the screenshot was only related to the file's name.  As I wrote above, I only renamed the file and made no other changes whatsoever. 

After renaming the file using Windows Explorer and making no other changes, this is how the files appear now:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/lm3xx39qzdeiolx/fb2k_unicode_filenames_work-around.png

Lastly, I updated every component I have installed to the latest available versions.  There were about six or seven that all had updates.

Re: Unicode Characters In File Names

Reply #7 –
You shouldn't need to do that. I'd like to know what caused your original issue. Did you perhaps initially load the files using a playlist or a cue sheet? That would explain the problem as neither M3U nor CUE support anything but ANSI character sets originally.

Would be nice if you renamed your files back and tried loading them directly from Explorer or from foobar's music library for example. You should see that they work without any problems.

Re: Unicode Characters In File Names

Reply #8 –
Yes -- I used File | Load Playlist... to load an M3U playlist file that has file names matching what is stored on my file system.

I can try M3U8 playlist instead, and this may be closed as a user error.

Re: Unicode Characters In File Names

Reply #9 –
I getenrated the M3U file using XML technology.  The issue was that UTF-8 encoding was used in an M3U file.  I could have simply changed the extension to M3U8.

I modified my XSLT transform to write out M3U8 files.  I loaded the resulting playlist, and all looks good.  I already renamed everything, but that really is not a big deal.  My tags have the correct content, so renaming, if I really wanted to, is simply using my batch tag editor.

This is resolved.

Thank you!

Re: Unicode Characters In File Names

Reply #10 –
Yes, plain M3U does not support Unicode, not without a byte order marker. But I don't think foobar2000 attempts to decode non-.m3u8 extensioned files as Unicode.
 

Re: Unicode Characters In File Names

Reply #11 –
My generated file did have a byte order marker, so it seems the extension forced the handling causing the issue.